A long time ago, I wrote Caverns of Slime for Fight On! #14. Lior Wehrli pushed me to be more experimental with dreams and visions. Thank you! At the time, some brave souls drew very nice pictures to go along with this dungeon level. Thank you very much, Ndege Diamond and Kelvin Green. As it seems that Fight On is on a de factohiatus, I’m going to make the Caverns of Slime “public”. Thus, if you’re interested in dungeon level 13 of the Fight On! megadungeon Darkness Beneath, there you go.

When I asked for an editor on the forum, Chris Roberts volunteered. English not being my first language, I felt that getting an editor is very important. Having acted as an editor myself (Stonehell, Theorems & Thaumaturgy), I know how boring it can be and how much discipline it requires. So, thank you very much for volunteering!

As the editing process got underway, we moved from the wiki to Open Office, and that’s why the PDF version differs from web version. The PDF is available as well, of course. There is a ton of advice on how to do layout out there, but I also have finite patience and skill. I guess I’ll keep returning to the PDF every now and then. Something about the ease of editing makes me want to stick to the wiki when updating the adventure. Perhaps all I will need to do, however, is make sure the PDF looks good as I add another picture or two. Having more pictures is always a good thing.

The wiki version is more radical in its approach to emphasis: it uses a lot more bold to draw the referee’s attention to what I felt was important. For the PDF, this was toned down. If you, gentle reader, have an opinion on the generous use of bold, please leave a comment.

When I wrote Caverns of Slime, I tried to follow my own advice on how to design a high level dungeon. Unfortunately, I only got to play test parts of it. If you ever use it or parts of it, leave a comment. I’d love to hear how it went—and maybe we could make changes to the dungeon and keep making it better and better.

The same is true for more art: If you ever draw something from the big list, I’d love to add it! At the time I suggested the following items to Calithena—perhaps the list will help you decide whether the Caverns of Slime is something you’d be interested in running.

traveling on the river Styx with giant eels in the water and/or up to 60 ghouls marching on the shore; possibly with a catapult and launching ghouls with kites; possibly with a bulbous demon in a pompous cart surrounded by lemurs and two psychic lampreys

an underground lake with bubbles popping and floating eyes rising from the water

a beholder rising from an underground lake, the air filled with floating eyes

a raft with froglings on an underground lake

orcs on air sharks throwing flasks of green slime

a panzer ship in Jules Verne steampunk style operated by a crew of forty headless zombies and defended by forty hungry ghoul archers the captain of a panzer ship guarded by two brass golems

a huge reception hall with a stair zig-zagging up five floors at the far end; 300 zombies standing between you and the next door at the top of the stairs

a round hole in a brass wall with a huge toothy ether whale silently trying to push through a wall of flesh into the room the mother brain the size of a small house in a liquid behind a blue glass wall, a mind flayer in the same room

a constant mass of meat and bones and mud pours through a planar gate and drives the turbines and cog wheels of the blood engines; there are several melancholy zombies watching over the mess

out of the mist rises a white, filigree sponge pyramid, a fractal construction without a clear separation of rooms or corridors, no furniture, no tools, no people

swan ships (can throw hundreds of yards of animated silk up into the air, like fluttering wings; this will break a fall and allow the boat to sail over waterfalls)

an eight-armed monstrosity of steel and a few organic elements of human descent

a big cavern; on the ceiling, you see a glowing city with light bubbles and hanging bridges and gray webbing holding everything together

canals with steep walls, and along the walls, thousands of barred windows; cages are hanging from chains, carried by cranes, flocks of imps cling to every handhold and dance around big braziers

a whale sorcerer

a siren chained to the wall behind a writhing mass of white-yellow tentacles with scythe-tips and two baleful eyes (a vampire octopus rising from the water)

one-eyed crow priestess of the orcs and her four orc witches are bargaining with a hanging tree; its branches are loaded with twitching corpses: armless ghouls are hanging up there, unable to free themselves

a black tent illuminated with a hundred candles; the altar is full of dried blood, many curse scrolls and skulls are hanging in the darkness above; here lives an orc witch

a room with a floor hundred of feet below; in between is a mess of stairs, passages, hanging vats, huge distilling machineries and vats, hundred of vats with half formed creatures churning, trying to climb out, and dissolving again

a dwarven cave carved into stone; marble columns covered in golden flowers, alcoves housing statues of armed angels, at the very center of the complex under a soaring cupola, illuminated by magic from above is the dwarven slime sorcerer himself, writing in his research notebook and protected by an iron protector golem

(The pieces that I have are marked up using strike out in the list above.)

AlexSchroeder I don’t know, really. From the outside, it looks as if Calithena is still around, but other priorities have taken over. I think it’s quite understandable and our misfortune is that Fight On! doesn’t have a dedicated team that can take over. A single person effort also has a single point of failure. It would seem to me that we’d need a handful of people to help out or take over.